This is Not Miami

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Lights in the Sky,” the first relato in the volume, encapsulates this narrative approach. On a trip to Dead Man’s Beach in Veracruz, the nine-year-old Melchor sees strange lights moving fast across the night sky. She interprets these as UFOs, getting caught up in a burst of public fascination with extraterrestrials. The mystery is casually punctured when a family friend observes that the lights are from narco planes. These clandestine flights traffic cocaine into Veracruz, seemingly under the supervision of the Federal Judicial Police. She is a fearless writer; bold, uncompromising and brutal. She wants her readers to feel the reality of life in the parts of Mexico that don’t make global headlines, that we, in other countries don’t hear about. Yeah sure, we have an inclination from movies and fictional literature, but Melchor’s aim is to bring real events into her work to unmask the reality, brutality and often horror of life in some of the more remote and non-tourist parts of Mexico. But with Melchor as a character, exploring and archiving Veracruz, we do get a clearer picture. While this Veracruz is similarly bleak to the one we see in her other works, it is also Veracruz positioned within a specific context. We follow along as Melchor traces changes during a grim period for the city and state: the governorship of Fidel Herrera Beltrán and the takeover of the state by Los Zetas.

Book Genre: Essays, Latin American, Latin American Literature, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Spanish Literature, Womens Seamlessly translated by Sophie Hughes from the initial Spanish, This Is Not Miami is a compelling read. However, be warned; these tales may well devour your dreaming.’Sophie Hughes translated each of these texts into English, and again in This Is Not Miami, she captures the swaggering vernacular of Melchor’s Veracruz. Only one of the relatos, previously unpublished, uses the lengthy, polyvocal paragraphs of Melchor’s later work. The others showcase Melchor writing, and Hughes translating, in a lighter and more conversational style. Los relatos suceden en Veracruz, muestran la presencia del narco, cómo ha afectado a la ciudadanía, a las prácticas culturales. Una ciudad, un puerto, la ignominia, la injusticia y un par de ojos bien abiertos que saben transformar lo escuchado, lo leído, lo vivido, en unas historias brutales.

She isn’t holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she’s dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find. ... In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made.’ Time spent with her writing leaves no doubt: the unholy noise she creates is the work of someone who knows exactly which notes to hit.’The writing is never ostentatious, never dramatic or 'look at me' even when describing outrageous events (and a shout-out to Sophie Hughes for such a natural translation) but this is powerful stuff. My thanks to @fitzcarraldoeditions and @netgalley for my copy of this book – look out for it when it’s published on 10th May. These learned ways of speaking pervade This Is Not Miami. The final relato is entitled “Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta,” a variant on a familiar formulation for talking about areas under the dominion of the Zetas (zeta is the Spanish word for the letter z). Óscar Martínez’s 2016 book A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, for example, contains a chapter called “Guatemala Is Spelled with a Z.” This Is Not Miami was Melchor’s first book, published in 2013 (and again in 2018) as Aquí no es Miami, but it is her third work translated into English. In the decade between the Spanish and English publications, Melchor has soared to national and international acclaim; her novel Hurricane Season was published in English in 2020 and short-listed for the International Booker Prize, while Paradais was published in English in 2022 and long-listed for the International Booker.